Better, Faster, Stronger

Silicon Valley’s self-help guru.

This is the age of the self-experimenter, Ferriss says.Credit Photograph by Chris McPherson

A few months ago, Timothy Ferriss, a self-help author, threw himself a party in San Francisco, where he lives. Officially, it was not a celebration for his most recent book, “The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman,” which came out in December and is already in its eleventh printing. In the book, Ferriss tells his readers, “Hack yourself,” and presents them with hundreds of “scientific rules for redesigning the human body”: bathing in ice to lose weight, eating organic almond butter on celery sticks to treat insomnia. Nor was the party meant to mark the enduring success of his first book, “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich,” which is still on the Times’ business best-seller list after four years. That book counsels readers to limit their newspaper reading to the headlines visible from vending machines and to outsource the management of their calendars and finances to a remote personal assistant in Bangalore.

As Ferriss took the stage at the Broadway Studios, a club on a seedy strip in North Beach, he explained that the party was intended to encourage cross-pollination among members of the many social and business spheres he inhabits. “Everyone here is extremely awesome in their own way, but we all have our own echo chambers,” Ferriss announced over a microphone, as his guests milled around the dance floor, drinking cocktails with names like Sex Machine and Übermensch. Ferriss went on, “Everyone here rocks, and I want you to go out of your comfort zone and talk to someone you don’t know.”

I didn’t know anyone, so I went out of my comfort zone to talk to a young man named Courtney Reum, who told me that he had left a job at Goldman Sachs to start a company that makes and sells Veev—an organic, kosher, gluten-free, carbon-neutral açai liquor, bottled in recycled glass, with labels printed with soy inks. I also met Tracy Reifkind, a fitness instructor, who is featured in “The 4-Hour Body”; she recounted losing more than a hundred pounds by swinging kettlebells, a technique endorsed by Ferriss, and told me, “I’m the Jazzercise of kettlebells.” There was Mike Geary, who has a Web site called truthaboutabs.com, which mints money; he lives in Vail, Colorado, and begins every day by checking the ski report. I discovered that Reid Mihalko, who runs a sex-advice Web site called reidaboutsex.com—“What Tim Ferriss does for stuff, I do for sex”—has incredibly warm hands.

M. J. Kim, a publicist, fondly described Ferriss as “the smartest self-promoter I know.” Shortly after they met, Kim recalled, Ferriss asked her if he could piggyback the launch of “The 4-Hour Workweek” onto a birthday party that she was throwing for herself. “It was ridiculous,” Kim said. “While everyone was having cocktails and singing ‘Happy Birthday,’ he was handing out copies of his book. It was a case of ‘Who is that guy?’ ” Ferriss’s close friend Chris Ashenden was also at the party. They first met a few years ago, in Buenos Aires; Ashenden, a New Zealander, is immortalized in Ferriss’s work as the Kiwi. (“The 4-Hour Body” notes that the Kiwi “had competed in elite-level rugby in New Zealand but was equally proud, I soon learned, of applying his B.S.E. in exercise physiology to perfecting the female posterior.”) “Tim’s awesome!” Ashenden shouted to me over the booming sound system, before turning to speak into the ear of an attractive young woman upon whom his exercise regimen would be redundant.

Ferriss, who is thirty-three years old, is almost impossibly affable, with a square jaw, twinkling blue eyes, and a tanned, well-shaped skull that beams through his close-cropped fair hair. At the party, he bounded around the room, dispensing vigorous hugs to the women and grasping the men by the deltoid muscle. A tall woman with long dark hair, who was wearing a black cocktail dress with a plunging neckline and high-heeled red shoes, approached him. “Hi, Tim, I’m Amy,” she said. Ferriss, who was dressed in jeans and an untucked plaid shirt, yelped in delighted recognition, and hugged her warmly.

She was Amy Hogg, his remote executive assistant, who lives in Kelowna, British Columbia. Hogg explained, “I was working part time for another author, and Tim wrote me an e-mail asking, ‘Do you know any other bad-ass Canadian chicks who work as virtual assistants?’ ” She’d volunteered her own bad ass, and a couple of years ago gave up her other clients to focus on Ferriss. Though they were typically in touch by e-mail at least once a day, they had never met. Ferriss looked Hogg up and down admiringly, and said, “If I’d known my assistant was so hot, I’d have met you a lot sooner!”

Every generation gets the self-help guru that it deserves. In 1937, at the height of the Depression, Napoleon Hill wrote “Think and Grow Rich,” which claimed to distill the principles that had made Andrew Carnegie so wealthy. “The Power of Positive Thinking,” by Norman Vincent Peale, which was published in 1952, advised readers that techniques such as “a mind-emptying at least twice a day” would lead to success. By the seventies, Werner Erhard and est promised material wealth through spiritual enlightenment. The eighties and nineties saw management-consultancy maxims married with New Age thinking, with books such as Stephen Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” In the past decade or so, there has been a rise in books such as “Who Moved My Cheese?,” by Spencer Johnson, which promise to help readers maximize their professional potential in an era of unpredictable workplaces.

Ferriss’s books appeal to those for whom cheese, per se, has ceased to have any allure. “This book is not about finding your ‘dream job,’ ” Ferriss writes in “The 4-Hour Workweek.” “I will take it as a given that, for most people, somewhere between six and seven billion of them, the perfect job is the one that takes the least time.” But Ferriss doesn’t recommend idleness. Rather, he prescribes a kind of hyperkinetic entrepreneurialism of the body and soul, with every man his own life coach, angel investor, Web master, personal trainer, and pharmaceutical test subject. One’s body can become one’s own laboratory: with “a few tweaks,” Ferriss suggests, its performance can be maximally enhanced—just as in the movie “Limitless,” but without the nasty withdrawal symptoms. His books seem to have a particular resonance for Wired-reading, Clif Bar-eating men—those whose desire to improve their abdominal definition may not be so great that they will subscribe to Men’s Health but who find in Ferriss the promise of heightened braininess complemented by an enviable degree of brawniness.

Ferriss likes to declare that this is the age of the self-experimenter, and his mantra is “minimal effective dose.” His goal is to determine how much can be achieved with how little, and his method is to interview experts—Ray Cronise, a former NASA scientist; Pavel Tsatsouline, a former Soviet Special Forces instructor; Nina Hartley, a porn actress—and convey their findings in prose that ranges from alarmingly high-tech to reassuringly conversational. Ferriss’s more technical passages sound like an Onion satire of a TED talk. In a passage about losing body fat, he writes, “If you are under 25%, still aim for DEXA, BodPod, or ultrasound. If you cannot find these, opt for calipers with a qualified professional (use the same person for all follow-up visits) and request the 3-point or 7-point Jackson-Pollock algorithm.” But in his more demotic moments he sounds like a staff writer for Maxim: “So cover the baby’s ears. I’m going to tell you something stunning and disgusting. . . . Most guys like pornography. And Santa Claus does not exist.”

Ferriss’s self-experimentation has not been without its risks: in 2009, he landed in the emergency room with a joint infection after getting a series of human-growth-factor injections at a sports-medicine facility in Arizona. And once, in Cape Town, after megadosing on resveratrol, which may extend life in laboratory mice, he discovered that the tablets also contained a laxative. Such stunts might lead readers to conclude that Ferriss is something of a quack, but he is careful to issue disclaimers. “Please don’t be stupid and kill yourself,” he writes. “It would make us both quite unhappy. Consult a doctor before doing anything in this book.”

Critics have compared him to P. T. Barnum, and he certainly has a skill for self-salesmanship: this spring, he relentlessly talked up Costco’s decision to discontinue stocking “The 4-Hour Body”—a decision he suggests was made on account of the explicitness of a chapter entitled “The 15-Minute Female Orgasm”—and the ensuing controversy inspired a marketing bonanza of prurient Google searches. Ferriss, naturally, sees himself as more than a mere huckster. “It’s extremely easy to mix my words so that it sounds more like a message from P. T. Barnum than from a Thoreau or a Seneca, with whom I identify much more,” he told me not long ago. He particularly admires Seneca for his mastery of strategic thinking and for his advocacy of a practice of detachment from worldly things. Ferris estimates that, over the years, he has given away more than four hundred copies of “Letters from a Stoic,” which he calls “the ideal operating system for anyone who wants to operate in high-stress environments.” That’s a considerable figure, though it hardly rivals the thousands of copies of “The 4-Hour Body” that Ferriss signed for a pre-order promotion on barnesandnoble.com, in the hope of enhancing his ranking on the best-seller lists. (The book hit the Times’ Advice, How-To, and Miscellaneous list at No. 1.)

Ferriss’s first book, “The 4-Hour Workweek,” was turned down by twenty-six publishers before being accepted by Crown, and he recounts this statistic with pride. But it’s easy to understand the caution of those twenty-six. Ferriss’s aesthetic is a pointed rejection of the culture of constant BlackBerrying, corporate jockeying, and office all-nighters that is celebrated in most business-advice books, and in films such as “The Social Network.” “The 4-Hour Workweek” was inspired by a personal epiphany. In 2004, Ferriss, feeling burned out as the C.E.O. of a sports-nutrition company, where he worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week, discovered that he preferred to spend his time learning the tango in Buenos Aires or archery in Kyoto. He also found that, by automating his business operations to the largest extent possible, he was able to pull this off. (To a point, at least. Kane Ng, a Hollywood executive who is Ferriss’s friend, told me, expansively, “Tim is a total fraud, you know. ‘Four-hour workweek’? He is constantly busting ass.” Of course, it was Seneca who said that hyperbole “asserts the incredible in order to arrive at the credible.”) Ferriss advises would-be members of the New Rich to check e-mail no more than twice a day, and to set automated responses advising correspondents of the recipient’s unavailability. (Anyone who e-mails Ferriss these days immediately receives in her inbox an automated response, with the cheery sign-off “Here’s to life outside of the inbox!”) The book counsels readers to take what Ferriss calls “mini-retirements” now—a month in Costa Rica, three months in Berlin—rather than saving up the prospect of leisure for the final decades of life. And it recommends funding all this by discovering a “muse,” which Ferriss defines, as Seneca did not, as “an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time.”

Finding one’s muse, like catching one’s rabbit before cooking it, is more easily said than done, but Ferriss’s advocacy of liberation from the workplace has had a wide appeal, especially among younger people to whom the workplace may be unattainable in the first place, given the unemployment rate. Similarly, his latest book, “The 4-Hour Body,” speaks to the peculiar obsessions and insecurities of the young American male. Ferriss tells readers how they might lose twenty pounds in thirty days without exercise—eggs, spinach, and lentils are crucial—and how to triple their testosterone levels. (Gentlemen, put your iPhone in the pocket of your backpack, not the pocket of your jeans.) The book, which is five hundred and forty-eight pages long, contains a lot of colorfully odd advice—he recommends increasing abdominal definition with an exercise he calls “cat vomiting”—but it also reassures readers that they need not go so far as to have Israeli stem-cell factor injected into the cervical spine, as Ferriss did in the name of inquiry. Nor need they necessarily incorporate into their regimen Ferriss’s method for determining the effectiveness of controlled binge eating: weighing his feces to find out exactly what kind of shit he was full of.

The first time I met Ferriss was in New York, at Fred’s, a restaurant in the Barneys department store on the Upper East Side. In a time-efficiency technique adapted from “The 4-Hour Workweek,” he had “clustered” two consecutive meetings, arranging to meet me immediately after spending time with a couple of movie producers. In a clustering miscalculation, however, Ferriss had neglected to seat himself with a view of the restaurant’s doorway, so that I entered and was seated without him noticing, and spotted him before he saw me. He was unmistakable: bobbing on his seat in a T-shirt and jeans in a roomful of men wearing dark suits and women with Japanese-straightened hair, he looked like a friendly backpacker hoping to fulfill a couch-surfing rendezvous with a hospitable stranger.

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Ferriss grew up in the Hamptons, though not, he was quick to point out, amid the kind of folk who shop at Barneys. “I did not grow up playing tennis with Steven Spielberg and drinking wine with Jerry Seinfeld—I grew up serving coffee to those people,” he told me. His father was a real-estate agent, and his mother was a physical therapist who worked with geriatric patients. “I was a townie,” he went on. “I was the kid with the rat tail dreaming of tearing the hood ornaments off fancy cars.”

Ferriss went to local schools until he was in his freshman year at East Hampton High, when a friend who attended St. Paul’s, the élite boarding school in New Hampshire, told Ferriss that he should apply. He did so, and was accepted, arriving for his sophomore year. Ferriss had been wrestling since childhood, and he became an eager member of the St. Paul’s team. John Buxton, the school’s former wrestling coach, who is now the headmaster of Culver Academies, in Indiana, recalls, “Tim worked really hard—he always wanted to improve and was willing to give his best effort. Then you began to see the more entrepreneurial side. He would start to do more with less. He would come to me and say, ‘I have discovered this technique: instead of putting two hundred and fifty pounds on the bar and doing the entire bench press, I am going to put three hundred on the bar and move it just a few inches.” Some years later, Ferriss won a national Chinese-kickboxing championship through similar entrepreneurialism. He scoured the fine print of the rules and discovered that, if a combatant fell off the fighting platform three times within a round, he lost the match. “I decided to use this technicality as my principal technique and push people off,” Ferriss writes in “The 4-Hour Workweek.” “I won all my matches by technical knock-out . . . and went home national champion.”

St. Paul’s required students to study a foreign language, and Ferriss chose Japanese; he spent his junior year living with a host family in Tokyo and attending a Japanese school. It was a formative experience. “I realized how arbitrary a lot of my rules were,” he said. “In Japan, you bathe before you get into the bathtub, and there is a seniority in the order in which you go into the same bath. All these conventions that I realized were fairly arbitrary led me to question a lot of assumptions that I had in all areas.” A highlight of his Japanese sojourn was being invited to participate in a sumo practice. “I ended up getting dressed by two sumo wrestlers, which is unusual, as a fifteen-year-old, to be stripped down and have this canvas roll hiked up between your buttocks,” he told me.

He wrote about that experience for his college-application essay, and was accepted at Princeton, where he enrolled first to study neuroscience before switching to a major in East Asian studies. Ferriss speaks Japanese and Mandarin, although to see him do so brings irresistibly to mind Mike Myers speaking Cantonese in “Wayne’s World.” While at Princeton, Ferriss tried to market audiotapes of college-admissions advice for high-school students, but the idea bombed. Before graduating, he took some time off to try another business venture—building a chain of high-end gyms in Taiwan—and that failed, too. (He still has lingering fantasies of opening his own gym: “It would be gritty and dirty and really expensive. I think that would be really fun to do: get some bunker or dilapidated warehouse and turn it into this factory for physical monsters. And you could have this secret, pristine, sterile room, where once a week doctors come in to take blood draws, and you could have a phlebotomist on staff.”) After college, Ferriss moved to Silicon Valley, where he worked in sales for a data-storage startup, and discovered that he could best his colleagues by making most of his phone calls immediately before and after regular business hours, at which time he was least likely to be deflected by a secretary.

He joined an association of startup entrepreneurs and volunteered to be its event producer, wrangling speakers with whom he had a particular fascination, including Jack Canfield, the co-editor of the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series. Ferriss offered Canfield introductions to the world of Silicon Valley, and Canfield agreed to speak without a fee. “Tim has no problem asking for things,” Canfield told me. “I teach that in my work. He would send me e-mails every once in a while telling me what he was doing, and he would ask for advice.” Canfield became a mentor to Ferriss, and found him a literary agent, though the exchange has, over the years, grown to become more mutually advantageous. “I learned stuff from his last book,” Canfield said. “The fifteen-minute-orgasm chapter—my wife and I tried the technique and had great success with that.” Canfield is not the only best-selling writer Ferriss has befriended: Nassim Taleb, the author of “The Black Swan,” says that he, too, has adopted elements of “The 4-Hour Body,” such as swinging kettlebells and strategically bingeing on protein. “The second time we met, we had lunch, and we ate every single egg they had in the restaurant,” Taleb says.

In 2000, Ferriss founded the sports-nutrition company—his last “real” job. The company sold a supplement called BrainQuicken, which was targeted at students and promised to improve retention and recall. The product took off when it was rebranded for athletes, under the name BodyQuick, and as sales increased Ferriss found himself becoming stressed and overworked. Ferriss recalls that his girlfriend at the time, tiring of his long days, gave him a photo frame containing the motto “Business Hours End at 5 P.M.” “She said, ‘Put this on your desk—I think you need this as a reminder for your own personal health,’ ” he told me. “It was like a ‘Dear John’ letter.” He sold the business a couple of years ago, when its function as a muse—generating cash without consuming time—had been rendered unnecessary by the cash-generating properties of his books. “The business was like an anti-virus software on the computer—it slows you down,” he said. “It was always occupying five or ten per cent of my brain.”

These days, Ferriss lives by a different inspirational quotation, from the chef Bobby Flay: “Take the risks and you’ll get the payoffs. Learn from your mistakes until you succeed. It’s that simple.” It sits, framed, on his desk in his apartment, in San Francisco, next to a bookcase filled with copies of “The 4-Hour Workweek” in several of the thirty-four other languages into which it has been translated. The apartment has an interior garden filled with tropical plants (“my hyperbaric chamber”) and a kitchen stocked with green and white teas, which he drinks in the belief that they may help ward off cancer. When I visited, a pair of swimming trunks stained with shark blood was hanging out of a laundry basket—Ferriss recently had been tagging tiger sharks at a marine-biology lab in Florida “for fun.”

Various pieces of punitive-looking exercise equipment were arrayed on the living-room floor, making it look like the staging area for an infomercial. On the bookshelf were manga comic books in several languages; Ferriss uses them to hone his vernacular skills. (In addition to Japanese and Mandarin, he speaks Spanish and some German.) A copy of “The Last Lecture,” a valedictory speech by the computer scientist Randy Pausch, was on the bookshelf with its cover turned outward: it was a kind of memento mori, Ferriss explained. Kettlebells lined the entry hall, as did Ferriss’s footwear collection: sneakers, Vibrams, and a pair of over-the-knee black suède women’s boots, not in his size. A suit of kendo armor stood in a corner. There was, inevitably, a framed arty photograph of a naked woman.

Ferriss conducted me up the stairs to his loft bedroom, which was equipped with a Zeo brain-wave monitor to measure sleep patterns. “This is where the magic happens,” he said, jocularly. Ferriss’s fifteen-minute-orgasm chapter may be his most-thumbed: it features hand-drawn illustrations, similar to those showing the Heimlich maneuver which restaurants are obliged to display, demonstrating how a woman’s partner might “facilitate” an extended paroxysm. The experience that Ferriss is promoting is less superhuman than the chapter title implies: it’s a fifteen-minute session of precisely targeted stroking, during which the female partner climaxes repeatedly. “It’s not just one clenched vagina for fifteen minutes—that would be horrible for everyone,” he told me.

Ferriss does not have a serious girlfriend at present, but he says that one day he would like to marry and have children, and he has banked his sperm as a precautionary measure. His four-hour efficiency techniques do not, he says, necessarily translate well to the arena of romance: “You can’t have the four-hour love life,” he says. He admits that his sex chapters have piqued the interest of some partners, though he does not recommend implementing his techniques on a first encounter. “It would be really weird on a first date, because you are side-straddling the woman, facing her feet,” he said. “I think it would be a real flip of the coin as to how the woman responds. She will either assume you’re a serial killer, or Rain Man, or it could be very positive.”

Shortly before the end of the academic year, Ferriss visited Princeton to address a class in entrepreneurialism taught by Ed Zschau, a professor in the department of electrical engineering. When Ferriss was a college student, he took the same class, and for the past nine years he has returned to share his experience and insights. I ran into Ferriss outside the building, where he was squatting on a ledge, putting into practice the “4-Hour Workweek” precept of working from anywhere by animatedly talking into the camera of his laptop, recording a promotional video to be posted to his blog. There are hazards to this on-the-go approach: as he finished up the video, Ferriss accidentally knocked the notepad that contained his lecture’s outline—along with notes for other projects—down a storm grate.

Without his notes, Ferriss relied on his well-honed biography, telling the students about his route from Princeton to Silicon Valley and beyond; saying that his book had been yanked from the shelves of Costco; and advising them to read “Letters from a Stoic” as well as “Let My People Go Surfing,” by Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, and “Losing My Virginity: How I’ve Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way,” by Richard Branson, the British billionaire. “With those, you’ll have pretty much all you need to jump out there,” he said. After the talk, students lined up to snap pictures with Ferriss on their iPhones. A young man from Kazakhstan addressed Ferriss in Japanese before striking a kickboxing pose for the camera. Others asked him how to reach him with follow-up questions. Ferriss accommodated their requests with generous, open-source charm.

Ferriss professes to be untroubled that his own freedom to live “outside of the inbox” is bought by transferring drudgery to the inboxes of less fortunate individuals in the developing world. “There are people I have outsourced to in India who now outsource portions of their work to the Philippines,” he told me. “It’s the efficient use of capital, and if you want the rewards of a free market, if you want to enjoy the rewards of the capitalist system, these are the rules by which you play.” One of his favorite new startups, he told me, is a company called Samasource, which outsources transcription and other internet-based work to refugee camps and other impoverished communities. Ferriss is a generous donor to certain nonprofits: a portion of the proceeds from “The 4-Hour Body” go to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and he is on the advisory board of donorschoose.org, an online charity targeting classrooms in need, which was started by Charles Best, a former wrestling teammate from St. Paul’s.

In a further exploration of the rewards of a free market, Ferriss has teamed up with Amazon to publish his next book, “The 4-Hour Chef,” which will appear next spring—a move that adds considerable muscle to the company’s burgeoning effort to position itself as not just a seller but also a publisher of books. “One of my greatest joys in life is trying things that haven’t been done before, and I simply wanted to play in a different sandbox,” he said. Ferriss has extended his portfolio of interests to investing: he has begun providing marketing advice to various startups in exchange for equity, and has acquired stakes in Facebook and Twitter, assuming that sufficient numbers of people will opt for the appeal of digital connectivity over the allure of recreational shark-tagging, competitive tango dancing, or any of the other activities that one might pursue in the hundred and sixty-four hours of free time in a four-hour workweek.

After the Princeton talk, Ferriss headed back to Manhattan. He had a meeting that evening with a hedge-fund manager who wanted to hire him as a high-end personal trainer and life coach. Ferriss relished the opportunity to apply his four-hour tools not to help the fund manager design a more satisfying life style outside his work but to make his mastery of the universe even more masterly. “It is about how can I, potentially, train him to be three times what he is currently in terms of cognitive and physical performance,” he said. “Right now, he is at the very top of that world, and wants to remain at the very top of that world. Very frequently, those people almost by necessity burn the candle at both ends, so if you can improve your work capacity and performance it’s a very clear competitive advantage in a world where you are fighting for investors and funding.”

The notes he’d prepared for the meeting had also been in the book he’d dropped down the storm grate, but Ferriss was untroubled. Much of the material was backed up somewhere else, and in any case there was no point in obsessing over what could not be retrieved, especially when there was so much more to be gained. “Thank you, Seneca,” he said. ♦

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